Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

There is no single way to construct a rubric, but all rubrics follow a particular logic.  Rubrics create guidelines that allow faculty to evaluate their students' work.  The rubric explains the critera by which students will be judged and establishes a range by which the quality of their work is assessed.  Rubrics can be as simple as students passing or failing based on particular criteria, or they can be more complex.  A rubric's range can be simple numbers from "one"  to "three," for example, or the traditional "excellent," "good," "fair," or "poor."   What is most important is that the criteria being used to make judgments is very clear.  The specifics that determine each range need to be stated explicitly so that the student has the guidelines he/she needs to do well.   In other words, what is the specific criteria that an instructor will use to determine that work is "good" but not "excellent?"

Wiggins sums up rubrics by saying that "The best rubrics are those that

1. Are sufficiently generic to relate to general goals beyond an individual performance task, but specific enough to enable useful and sound inferences about the task.
2. Discriminate among performances validly, not arbitrarily, by assessing the central features of performance, not those that are easiest to see, count, or score.
3. Do not combine independent criteria in one rubric.
4. Are based on analylsis of many work samples and on the widest possible range of work samples, including valid exemplars.
5. Rely on desciptive language (what quality or its absence looks like) as opposed to merely comparative or evaluative language, such as "not as thorough as" or "excellent product," to make a discrimination.
6. Provide useful and apt discrimination that enables sufficiently fine judgments, but do not use so many points on the scale (typically more than six) that reliability is threatened.
7. Use descriptors that are sufficiently rich to enable student performers to verify their scores, accurately self-assess, and self-correct.  (Use of indicators makes description less ambiguous, hence more reliable, by providing examples of what to recognize in each level of performance.  However, even though indicators are useful, concrete signs of criteria being met, specific indicators may not be reliable or apapropriate in every context.)
8. Highlight judging the impact of performance (the effect, given the purpose) rather than overreward processes, formats, content, or the good-faith effort made" (184).

Rubric Templates

PCC Recommended Rubric Guidelines

Student Learning Outcomes in the CSUs: Links to examples of Scoring Rubrics

San Diego State University, College of Education website provides a basic template for designing a rubric:  http://edweb.sdsu.edu/triton/july/rubrics/Rubric_Template.html